Friday, March 9, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Three Lessons of Fukushima, One Year Later
As we approach on March 11 the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it’s a good time to take heed of the lessons from that tragic event.
Lesson one: Governments lie.
Three Lessons of Fukushima, One Year Later | The Progressive
whats up: RC's NUCLEAR BLOG
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Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Ishtar
The Sumerian Inanna/Ishtar, praising her "honey-man"
He has sprouted; he has burgeoned;
He is lettuce planted by the water.
He is the one my womb loves best.
My well-stocked garden of the plain,
My barley growing high in its furrow,
My apple tree which bears fruit up to its crown,
He is lettuce planted by the water.
My honey-man, my honey-man sweetens me always.
My lord, the honey-man of the gods,
He is the one my womb loves best.
His hand is honey, his foot is honey,
He sweetens me always.
My eager impetuous caresser of the navel,
My caresser of the soft thighs,
He is the one my womb loves best
He is lettuce planted by the water.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Criminals In Action
The carnage and mayhem committed by the criminal, unelected, unaccountable, woefully incompetent and ignorant C.I.A. on the rest of the world and, indeed, upon the American homeland itself defies belief, logic or common sense.
A crime committed behind closed doors, in secret is still a crime. The rest of the world trusted, lived their lives moved forwards but the C.I.A. has lied, cheated, stolen, in the name of American citizens, who are themselves being kept ignorant of the true nature of the United States of America.
What could have been a great country is now shamed and stumbling towards the abyss, citizens fighting and trampling others for $19 off a PlayStation, ignorant, or uncaring of the millions who have suffered and are suffering in their name, for their "freedom" to shop!
Culture, learning, art, beauty, truth all lost on people who don't want to know about the rest of the world, don't care about the children crying, even their own, it seems, every person just a commodity to be used and abused by capitalism, a system that has failed and is responsible for the failing, polluted world we now live in.
Come on you Yanks, stand up, be counted, don't put up with this any more, you cannot win any of the stupid, criminal wars you have started and most of you don't even know why your young people from poor families are being sent to murder other poor people from a different country.
STOP drinking the fluoride, stop eating the nasty food, remember you are human, people, no better or worse than anybody else, you don't have the right to kill others, tamper with other countries or believe you are the master race, face it you are a plague on the world, through the workings of your "democratic" government and everything they do is done in your name!
WAKEY WAKEY Yankie Doodle it's time to shine, be the light, be the change, write a letter, tell your friends, walk, march, be vocal, demand answers, you are not alone, the rest of the world wants this madness to stop, wants to fly through the night not hearing the children crying in their pain and grief, and perhaps, when you face these horrors, stand up for change and stop criminals murdering countless millions for your "security" the world will be kinder and gentler with you than you ever were with it.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
the human animal
The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder, and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanjing (Nanking), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Widespread rape and looting also occurred. Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. Several of the key perpetrators of the atrocities, at the time labelled as war crimes, were later tried and found guilty at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and were subsequently executed. Another key perpetrator, Prince Asaka, a member of the Imperial Family, escaped prosecution by having earlier been granted immunity by the Allies.
Eyewitness accounts of Westerners and Chinese present at Nanking in the weeks after the fall of the city state that over the course of six weeks following the fall of Nanking, Japanese troops engaged in rape, murder, theft, arson, and other war crimes. Some of these accounts came from foreigners who opted to stay behind in order to protect Chinese civilians from harm, including the diaries of John Rabe and American Minnie Vautrin. Other accounts include first-person testimonies of the Nanking Massacre survivors, eyewitness reports of journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. American missionary John Magee stayed behind to provide a 16 mm film documentary and first-hand photographs of the Nanking Massacre.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly. A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation or by stabbing a bayonet, long stick of bamboo, or other objects into the vagina. Young children were not exempt from these atrocities, and were cut open to allow Japanese soldiers to rape them.
On 19 December 1937, Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary:
I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet ... People are hysterical ... Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases.
Pregnant women were a target of murder, as they would often be bayoneted in the stomach, sometimes after rape. Tang Junshan, survivor and witness to one of the Japanese army’s systematic mass killings, testified:
The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. The soldier thought he might as well rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a spot about ten meters away. As he was trying to rape her, the woman resisted fiercely ... The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside. (read more)
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Why the Absent-Minded Professor Was So Absent Minded
Picture of the DayWhy the Absent-Minded Professor
Was So Absent Minded
Acrylic on paper, 36"x 24"
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Syrian Revolution
Assad massacres
while the West fiddles.
The Syrian regime will commit genocide to survive, while the international community amuses itself with sanctions. If it were not so sad, it would be funny.
Their death was sad and unnecessary, as was the task they went out to perform. There are blood-drenched locations, where the presence of war journalists reveals to an indifferent world, atrocities that they did not know about. Syria is not such a place. Syrian bloggers, iPhone photographers, and human rights activists tell the stories themselves. If there is a journalistic story that is worth getting killed for, they are not the ones that brought Ochlik and Colvin to Syria. Granted, people around the world have done little for the wretched citizens in Syria, but it was well aware of their hardships before Western journalists arrived on the scene. (read more)
Poor America - P a n o r a m a [B B C] - Broadcast Date: 13th February 2012
Propaganda ? Anti American ?
You decide, however as this programme was shown on the BBC at prime time in a well respected series, it seems this is how the world is expected to view America.....and Americans...poor people for whom the American dream probably always was a nightmare.
More division and isolation for the USA
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair
Pablo Picasso 1932
Dated 27 July 1932, this work belongs to the remarkable sequence of portraits that Picasso made of Marie-Thérèse Walter in his studio at the Chateau de Boisgeloup. Marie-Thérèse is presented here – as in almost her portraits – as a series of sensuous curves. Even the scrolling arms of the chair have been heightened and exaggerated to echo the rounded forms of her body. The face is a double or metamorphic image: the right side can also be seen as the face of a lover in profile, kissing her on the lips.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Shadowlands - photographs & stories from Fukushima
Shadowlands - photographs & stories from Fukushima
Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong visited the Fukushima region with Greenpeace in the autumn of 2011 to bear witness to the effects wrought on the region by the nuclear fallout from the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The shadow of radiation now looms over the people, the animals, and the environment of this area of Japan. Well-kept agricultural land is now becoming wild, children's play areas and petrol stations are contaminated and abandoned, and nature is taking back roads. Each photo captures the eerie beauty of a region left in limbo as radioactive fallout permeates all aspects of life.
This video was produced to accompany the exhibition. The interactive exhibition can be found at www.greenpeace.org/shadowlands.
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whats up: RC's NUCLEAR BLOG
they live
"I have come here
to chew bubble gum and kick ass,
and I'm all out of bubble gum."
(you've felt it your entire life)
(they live trailer)
(they live movie)
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Japanese American internment - 70 years ago | haiku
rounded up
"Tagged for evacuation, Salinas, California," May 1942 | Russell Lee
This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons
February 20, 2012 marked the 70th anniversary of #EO9066, the executive order signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt that authorized the deportation and eventual detainment of Japanese Americans from the west coast during World War II. Here is a great rundown of some of the essential facts related to internment, a particularly dark spot on our nation’s history and one glossed over by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans imprisoned, 2/3 were American citizens making the number of Japanese-Americans interned without cause greater then the population of Wichita, Kansas. Americans with as little as 1/8 Japanese ancestry were interned, including orphan infants and Americans of Taiwanese and Korean descent.
70 Years Ago Japanese-American Removal and Internments Began | Care2 Causes
Poetry in History
...In an era of liberal personhood, when most — but certainly not all, recent legislation in Arizona being a case in point — citizens of the United States enjoy relative protection under the law, how are we to respond to the egregious moment in 1942 when crowds of Japanese immigrants and their American-born children were herded onto fairgrounds, relegated to horse stalls and racetracks, and “relocated” to barbed-wire compounds and hastily constructed prison barracks throughout the nation? And all this, in response to sentiment like that expressed by columnist Henry McLemore: “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands… Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”
Autumn foliage
California has now become
a far country
–Yajin Nakao
Frosty night
listening to rumbling train
we have come a long way
–Senbinshi Takaoka
The Delta Ginsha [a free-verse poetry club] was founded in 1918 by Neiji Qzawa… Its members met monthly and submitted their haiku to the master of the month, who was usually the host or hostess for the evening. They submitted for consideration as many poems as they desired. The poems were then read and discussed and a vote was taken to determine the best haiku… It was an evening anticipated by the members—grape growers, onion farmers, teachers, housewives, bankers, pharmacists, and others—who had assembled for an enlightening cultural and social event.
Poetry in History: Japanese American Internment | Lantern Review Blog
Executive Order 9066
Japanese-American internment was the relocation and internment by the United States government in 1942 of approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States to camps called "War Relocation Camps," in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.[1][2] The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally throughout the United States. Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast of the United States were all interned, while in Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the territory's population, 1,200[3] to 1,800 Japanese Americans were interned.[4] Of those interned, 62% were American citizens.[5][6]
In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation said that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership".[12] The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs.[13]
Japanese American internment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Amache Japanese Internment Camp at Granada, Colorado
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Whirlo - Way
Walter Fredrick "Fred" Morrison (January 23, 1920 – February 9, 2010) was an American inventor and entrepreneur, best known as the inventor of the Frisbee. He was born in Richfield, Utah.
Morrison claimed that the original idea for a flying disc toy came to him in 1937, while throwing a popcorn can lid with his girlfriend, Lu, whom he later married. The popcorn lid soon dented which led to the discovery that cake pans flew better and were more common. Morrison and Lu developed a little business selling "Flyin' Cake Pans" on the beaches of Santa Monica, California.
During World War II he learned something of aerodynamics flying his P-47 Thunderbolt in Italy. He was shot down and was a prisoner of war for 48 days. (read more)
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
love is
Freedom and love go together.
Love is not a reaction.
If I love you because you love me,
that is mere trade,
a thing to be bought in the market;
it is not love.
To love is not to ask anything in return,
not even to feel that you are giving something-
and it is only such love that can know freedom.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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